One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Every week we have a student who is the "Star of the Week." On Friday afternoons the 'star' gives a short presentation about themselves. Each student brings pictures and other meaningful items from home to share with the rest of the class. The rest of the class has a chance to ask questions after the presentation. The students usually ask the 'star' questions like "What is your favorite color?" and "Where is the coolest place you've ever been?" It's a good activity to help the class and me get to know each student better.

John was our "Star of the Week" this week. The students asked John all the typical questions and he had pretty typical responses. Except for these two:

Erica: "What is your favorite kind of pie?"
John: "Chicken pot pie."

This got a few chuckles from the kids. A few questions later and we got this.

Josh: "What's your favorite animal?"
John: "Hmmm. Probably a unicorn. Or a pony."

No laughs at that one. Just a lot of blank stares. And an awkward 20 seconds of silence before the next question.

Santa is Coming to Town

We started a writing project last week to work on persuasion techniques. To introduce the project I had the students do a quick writing exercise with the directions as follows:

Pretend you are one of Santa's reindeer. Write a short letter to Santa Claus to persuade him that you should get a year off this year.

The students were excited to get started as soon as I went over the directions, but a few students had some questions. There were the typical questions like "How long does it have to be?" and "Do we need to spell everything right?" One student asked, "Can I pretend I'm any one of the reindeer?" I told Jillian that she could pretend to be whichever reindeer she wanted. Then Alexander's hand shot up.

"I could even be Rudolph?!"

Before I could answer, Josh replied in matter-of-fact tone:

"Rudolph isn't one of the reindeer. That's just a story. You have to be one of the real ones."

I decided to leave that one alone. The kids decided after a brief debate that Rudolph was a reindeer and therefore you could pretend you were him.

Whew.

About 10 minutes later, I overheard a conversation between Natalie and Samantha. They were discussing some of the things they wanted this year for Christmas. My favorite quote from their conversation:

"Santa always comes to my house. Even if I'm bad. I think.... (with great concentration and focus) my parents might have something to do with it though.

I just pray they don't ask me questions about these things...